Calibration of intercity trip time value with a network assignment model: a case study for the korean nw-se corridor

TLDR: In this paper, an innovative method for estimating the value of time (VOT) for intercity travelers with aggregate mode choice and origin-destination distribution data is presented. But it is based on the assumption that the current trip and mode distributions in a regional corridor are close to a "user-optimum" state, where all tripmakers have nearly perfect information about the fares and schedules of all competing transportation modes and mostly employ the criterion of minimum total trip cost in their tripmaking decision.

Abstract: This paper presents an innovative method for estimating the value of time (VOT) for intercity travelers with aggregate mode choice and origin-destination distribution data. The proposed method employs a network structure to capture the temporal and spatial interrelations of daily intercity trips among competing transportation modes. It is grounded on the assumption that the current trip and mode distributions in a regional corridor are close to a "user-optimum" state, where all tripmakers have nearly perfect information about the fares and schedules of all competing transportation modes and mostly employ the criterion of minimum total trip cost in their tripmaking decision. One can thus compare the current market share of each transportation mode with the estimated results to identify the best for VOT distribution. To realistically capture the competing environment for intercity trip decisions, the proposed method has incorporated not only the system performance factors in the modeling structure, but has also formulated the VOT as a distribution rather than a constant value across all system users. With the data from the northwest-southeast corridor of Korea, it has been demonstrated that the proposed method has the potential to circumvent the need to estimate time value with disaggregate surveys.